Capitalism is a wasteful scam. pic.twitter.com/oup1km8DII

— Hampton Institute (@HamptonThink) March 19, 2023

Capitalism clearly has inherent advantages, but it becomes parasitic when capital gets concentrated and becomes the all-powerful political force, with near-complete capture of the regulatory process. Capitalism becomes a problem when its externalities are completely ignored and run amok.

In the US and increasingly in the rest of the western world, capitalism has also captured the academic, media and think tank realm, shaping the mindset of the general public. For instance the taxation of imports or tariffs are characterized as "protectionism" or "isolationaism", terms with a pejorative connotation, while "free trade" is a positive term.

The main problem in US economy is that sometime starting in the 1970s we have switched from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism, placing capital over labor, and short term profits over long term, becoming an unproductive, rentier economy based of F.I.R.E.

This type of economy outsources well-paying blue collar jobs and creates social dislocations such as homelessness, expensive social services such as healthcare and education, and poor infrastructure in transport, energy etc. It is the reason why homelessness is a much bigger problem in NY or LA than in Shanghai or even say, Bangkok or Cairo, why public transit in SF or NY is horrendous or why college costs a fortune in the US. LA has 40 times as many homeless as Bangkok.

Economist Michael Hudson has addressed this problem very well.

dajo9 said:

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concordtom said:

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Tucker is wrong.

Wealth is created by increases in per capita productivity.
Technology gains are pretty much the only reason why per capita worker productivity increases. A man can only lift so much, sweat so much.

If robots can do jobs instead of people, that's a financial plus for society as a whole.

If 10M truckers are out of work, then they are available to do another job. That is a problem, and an opportunity.
Same problem with coal miners.
Same problem with carriage makers when cars displaced horses.
Computer word processors displaced simple typewriters.

Society needs to help displaced workers, yes!
Society should not stay wed to old ways of doing things because we can't figure out how to transition to better ways.

This topic gets bandied about often.
My position on it is clear.

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Tucker would rather we be inefficient and have the government have veto-power over the means of production (like 20th century fascists did) than just be a liberal and tax the wealthy and provide services.

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Governments in both capitalistic countries like Japan and S. Korea, as well as in mixed-economy China, have had a very positive role in promoting economic development. These countries have had a lot of success practising industrial capitalism, with the government as an active partner.

As to Tucker Carlson, here is the piece I've posted in his thread, in which he takes on "vulture capitalism", which as its name implies, is a highly destructive form of capitalism that emerged in the 1980s with LBOs and other predatory forms of capitalism consisting of capital harvesting short-term profits in finance deals at the expense of viable, productive businesses, in this case hedge fund oligarch Paul Singer making money in the process of scrapping Cabela's, destroying in the process the entire economic ecosystem of a thriving Nebraska town.



This is one of the best criticism of modern-day financial capitalism I have seen.

Capitalism is great, until you allow monopolies. We use to have strong monopoly enforcement, then they started paying off our congress people.

MinotStateBeav said:

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Capitalism is great, until you allow monopolies. We use to have strong monopoly enforcement, then they started paying off our congress people.

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You vote for the monopolies
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-big-idea/2018/7/3/17530320/antitrust-american-express-amazon-uber-tech-monopoly-monopsony